'Grande Hotel'

At the end of the 50s of the last century the neocolonial vision kept the focus on the colonial redoubts of Africa and Southeast Asia. They were the years of the continued defeats of the European metropolises in Vietnam, Algeria and the Spanish Sahara. The bloody times of the battles in Angola in the shadow of the world of blocks that began to be sketched after the Yalta conference. While the main European actors tried to maintain order in territories increasingly aware of their need for independence, the United States and the Soviet Union moved their imperialist interests to the old European colonies. In those years of transition to the madness of the disorderly abandonment of the colonies, in the city of Beira, in Mozambique, José Porto and Francisco de Castro completed the construction of the “Pride of Africa”, the Grande Hotel. Its ephemeral existence culminated in the middle of a civil war after the midnight chimes of December 31, 1981. The Grande Hotel had been closed for 19 years and had become the headquarters, prison and torture center of the Mozambican National Resistance Party. (RENANO) and gradually, improvised home of civil war and war refugees in the neighboring country of Zimbabwe. Today, after five decades of abandonment, the Grande Hotel stands as the phantasmagoric effigy of Portuguese fascism. A deceased mass of concrete converted into the abode of more than a thousand families. More than four thousand people - a few hundred more after the devastating cyclone that ravaged the country in early 2019 - live in overcrowded order with tons of garbage, rats, malaria, HIV, cholera and the two worst diseases in the world today: poverty and the injustice. With its own internal organization based on the sense of community and solidarity and with a housing structure that emulates a small city of chaos, the Grande Hotel became an unusual refuge for those fleeing the cyclone, as it was, decades before to who fled war and misery; also for those fleeing justice in a modern country where, however, poverty and social inequality reign everywhere.